Exploring Cabin Country

Almost everyone in the community of Adirondack hikers is aware of the key role the Forever Wild clause of the New York State Constitution has played in preserving wilderness on state-owned lands inside the Blue Line.

Fewer of us know the extent to which New York has served as a national and international model for wilderness protection. Fewer still know the story of the remarkable partnership forged by wilderness activists Paul Schaefer and Howard Zahniser in 18 eventful years following World War II, a period in which they owned adjacent cabins at the base of Eleventh Mountain on the eastern edge of the vast Siamese Ponds Wilderness.

In 1946, Schaefer and Zahniser embarked on a collaboration that first would lead to a victory in the 10-year “Black River War,” which prevented the power industry from building huge reservoirs in the western Forest Preserve. Zahniser then drove an eight-year effort to secure passage of the National Wilderness Preservation Act, a milestone in environmental legislation that achieved at the national level much of what the Forever Wild clause achieved in New York State.

The Wilderness Act established the National Wilderness Preservation System. Starting with 9.1 million acres, it today stands at 111 million. This statute permanently protects these areas from roads, mechanized vehicles, and power equipment such as chain saws.

The law codified an environmental ethic and achieved for wilderness a "legislative designation instead of an agency designation," said Ed Zahniser, Howard's son and current owner of the cabin his father bought for the family in 1946.

"New York's experience convinced my father that the only road to truly preserving wilderness was to do it under federal statute," the younger Zahniser said. "You had to take it out of the land-management bureaucracies and enfranchise ordinary citizens and their organizations who favored wilderness over dams, ski resorts, logging, mining, and grazing."

Inspiration From The Land

Both Paul Schaefer and Howard Zahniser drew inspiration from the land about which Schaefer would eloquently write in Adirondack Cabin Country, a collection of short essays published three years before his death in 1996.

Schaefer had discovered cabin country with his four siblings in 1921 when his parents, Peter and Rose, started bringing them from Schenectady to the hamlet of Bakers Mills each summer to escape the ragweed that intensified Rose's respiratory problems.

"He made friends with the local men who were hunters, fishermen, and trappers, and generally knew the woods, waters, and mountains in the area," said Evelyn Schaefer Greene, Paul's daughter. "He admired them and learned everything he could from them."

“They were city kids only in their teens who fell in love with the countryside,” added Jim Schaefer, nephew of Paul and son of Vincent Schaefer. “They learned firsthand from their parents and local natives the importance of these wild and fragile regions.”

Paul would go on to lead New York's wilderness conservation movement for a half-century, starting in 1931 when John Apperson enlisted him in a range of environmental battles. These included successful efforts to expand the Adirondack Park and to defeat the highway New York political operative and planner Robert Moses proposed to build on the shore of Lake George at Tongue Mountain.

By the time he met Paul Schaefer, Apperson had been fighting environmental battles for 20 years, mostly on and around Lake George.

"Appy found in Schaefer a talented and capable lieutenant, and gradually turned over important assignments to his young protégé," said Ellen Apperson Brown, Apperson's grand-niece. "Their relationship offers a template for successful political campaigns."

"Apperson figured out how to use grassroots proselytizing—lobbying—in his work to protect the shorelines of Lake George," added Ed Zahniser. "He had a huge impact on Paul, who then introduced and trained my father in grassroots work in the Black River War."

"Paul believed the hunters and fishers of the Adirondacks were the bedrock of the conservation movement, and without them you would fail in your efforts," said David Gibson, who, as managing partner of Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve, helps to lead the same organization that Paul Schaefer founded in 1945. "I'm in awe of the coalitions he formed.”

Zahniser’s Revelation

Zahniser found his way to cabin country via Washington, D.C., where he became a nationally respected spokesperson for wilderness conservation in the 1930s while working with the U.S. Biological Survey and writing a column for Nature Magazine. In 1945, he was named executive secretary and editor of the Wilderness Society, the organization that Bob Marshall had launched in 1935.

Zahniser met Schaefer for the first time in 1945 at a conference in New York City at which Schaefer and Apperson showed a documentary they had made to raise awareness of the threat that dam-building posed to Forest Preserve lands in the western Adirondacks. Schaefer invited 'Zahnie' and his family to experience the Adirondack wilderness firsthand that summer.

In Defending the Wilderness, Schaefer describes a two-day hike through the High Peaks and Zahniser's reaction upon seeing Hanging Spear Falls, a spectacular 75-foot waterfall that comes at the end of a 600-foot cataract:

"'Zahnie enjoyed the wild splendor of the scene -- the solitude, the remoteness, the roar of the water, the jumble of cliffs clothed by ferns and mosses and with evergreens clinging to narrow ledges and crannies in the rocks. It was not merely the beauty that won his heart and mind; it was how the place sparked all of his senses and made him feel vividly alive. He felt a sense of awe at nature's power at the falls, a feeling of being overwhelmed by the sights, sounds, and smells of this wild place high in the mountains."

The experience "galvanized" Zahniser, Mark Harvey writes in Wilderness Forever, his biography of Zahniser. "He wished that everyone might have the opportunity to hike and camp where the only sounds were the birds and the wind and the ripples on clear blue lakes."

A few weeks after his visit, Zahniser bought his own cabin just a few hundred yards from Schaefer's. Paul sent him a congratulatory telegram:

“Yours are the woods, waters, and wildlife of an Adirondack cabin land—up at the end of the trail where the wilderness begins, where a long peaceful valley meets the rocky buttresses of Crane [Mountain] and a sea of peaks rolls on to a far horizon. May you always cherish these rough untillable acres as a wild deer loves a sunny mountain ledge or an eagle the boundless reaches of sky.”

Between 1956 and his death in 1964, just weeks before Congress would finally pass the Wilderness Act, Zahniser produced 66 drafts of the legislation. During these years, Schaefer and Zahniser would meet on Zahniser's porch for its superior view of Crane.

The Prophetic Call Of Wilderness

In remarks delivered on the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson's signing of the Wilderness Act on September 3, 1964, Ed Zahniser reflected on the importance of wilderness in his father’s life and world perspective.

"The prophetic call of wilderness is not to escape the world. The prophetic call of wilderness is to encounter the world’s essence…In Aldo Leopold’s words, we will enlarge the boundaries of the community—we will live out a land ethic—only as we feel ourselves a part of the same community.

"By securing a national policy of restraint and humility toward natural conditions and wilderness character, the Wilderness Act offers a sociopolitical step toward a land ethic, toward enlarging the boundaries of the community...

“Howard Zahniser said that in preserving wilderness, we take some of the precious ecological heritage that has come down to us from the eternity of the past, and we have the boldness to project it into the eternity of the future."

Paul Schaefer, in foreground, and John Apperson fought together for wilderness conservation for half a century.

Howard Zahniser teamed up with Schaefer and Apperson in 1946 after a two-day hike through the High Peaks that led to Hanging Spear Falls.

Paul Schaefer describes building the 'Beaver House' in Adirondack Cabin Country.

Howard Zahniser purchased this cabin in 1946 at Paul Schaefer's urging following his visit to the Adirondacks.

Thanks to the Adirondack Mountain Club for permitting us to share this article with you, which originally appeared in the September/October 2022 issue of Adirondac magazine. You may buy individual copies here and subscriptions by joining the ADK here.

Dan Forbush and Bill Walker are collaborating with the Warren County Department of Planning and Community Development to support recreational and heritage tourism in the First Wilderness. This article is one product of that effort, with contributions gratefully acknowledged from Ed Zahniser, Jim Schaefer, Greg Schaefer, David Gibson, Evelyn Schaefer Greene, Ellen Apperson Brown, and Kirstin Seleen. Thanks also to the Warren County Historical Society, the Kelly Adirondack Center at Union College, and to the Skidmore College Program in Expository Writing.